He did not go to Duluth because she told him to. He went because Paul Strand had lived there.
He left the Point at seven, before Arne came out of the house. There had been a light in the kitchen since five. At the mailbox he turned south onto 61 with the sun coming up out of the lake on his left, red and flattened, like something that had been under pressure, and he did the hour and a half with the radio off.
Superior Title & Abstract occupied the second floor of an old brick building on West Superior Street, up steep stairs that smelled of radiator dust, behind a glass door with the firm’s name on it in gold letters that somebody had been proud of in about 1985.
The receptionist was a young man with a lip ring who took one look at Thorsen filling the doorway and went to get somebody without being asked.
The somebody was a man of sixty in a sweater vest, with half-glasses and a soft grey moustache and the look of a man who has spent his life finding errors in other people’s paperwork. His name was Dennis Albrecht, and he was the managing examiner. He did not ask Thorsen to sit down, and then, after a moment of looking at him, he did.
“You’re the cousin,” he said. “The one from the news.”
“Yes.”
“I wondered if somebody would come.” Albrecht took off the half-glasses and folded them and held them in both hands. “Nobody has, you know. From the sheriff. A deputy phoned on the Friday to ask what Paul’s job was, and said thank you, and that was it.” He looked at the glasses. “Fourteen years Paul worked here. He was the best examiner I ever had. He could read a hundred-year-old plat like you or I read a menu.”
“What was he doing for Laurentian?”
“Title work. Every parcel examined back to the original patent, then insurance on top. We had four examiners on it. Paul had the shore parcels, including your uncle’s.”
“And he found something.”
Albrecht turned the glasses over.
“He found what he thought was something. In the chain on the Point. And on the land behind it, the Hale land. He came to me in August very excited about a deed from 1924. He said there was a problem with it. Something about the grantor.” He shook his head. “I looked at it. It’s an old deed with an X on it for a signature, witnessed and notarised. You see a hundred of those up here. It’s been relied on for a century.”
“But Paul thought it was wrong.”
“Paul thought,” Albrecht said carefully, “that the man who made the mark was an Indian allottee, and that an allotment couldn’t be sold without approval from the Department of the Interior, and that there was no approval in the chain. And then he thought there was a problem with the date. He wouldn’t tell me what. He said he needed to check something first.” He set the glasses down on the desk. “Mr. Thorsen, I have a client who’s paying us a great deal of money and is in a hurry. If one of my examiners puts possible defect, Indian trust allotment, 1924 in a title report, that is not a note. That’s a bomb. I asked him what evidence he had. He said he’d have it soon. I said that until he had it, it wasn’t our job to dig up a hundred years of history for free. And I took him off the file.”
On the corner of the desk lay a fat black binder with a printed tab: LAURENTIAN COPPER — COMMITMENT ISSUED 8/19/26. Thorsen had bought one house in his life and signed one of those without reading it. It was the title company’s promise to insure, once the conditions were met.
“You insured it in August,” he said. “He came to you about the deed in August.”
Albrecht’s eyes went to the binder and came back.
“Commitments carry exceptions.”
“Is there one for 1924?”
Albrecht did not answer. The radiator ticked. Out in the front office the young man with the lip ring was on the phone, laughing at something.
“No,” Albrecht said.
“When did you take him off?”
“The second week of September.” He looked at the window. “He was very angry with me. He’d never been angry with me. He said, Dennis, if I’m right, there’s a man in this chain who was dead before he signed.” He said it flatly, as if reporting a figure. “I said, then prove it on your own time. And he did. He took vacation days. He went down to the Historical Society in St. Paul, and somewhere else, I don’t know where. He came in on the twenty-eighth, the Monday, and said he’d found it, and he’d show me the end of the week.” The moustache moved. “He was dead by the Thursday morning.”
“Did he leave anything here? Notes. Copies.”
“His desk is as he left it. There’s nothing on the Laurentian file that isn’t in the report. He did everything else at home, on his own laptop. He said it wasn’t the firm’s business.” Albrecht looked down at his hands. “I think he was protecting me. Which I didn’t deserve.”
He glanced at the clock over the door.
“I’m sorry. I’m not much use to anybody this month. I have to be at the hospital at four. My wife.” He put the half-glasses back on, as if to hide behind them. “His place is on Fifth Street. Up the hill. Somebody broke into it the weekend after he died. Did you know that?”
On his way out Thorsen wrote the number of the 7-Eleven phone on the back of one of the firm’s cards and left it on top of the binder.
Paul Strand had lived in the top half of a narrow green house on the Central Hillside, on a street so steep that the houses stood on each other’s shoulders to see the lake. There were wooden steps up from the pavement, and a porch, and two doors, one for upstairs and one for down. On the upstairs door somebody had nailed a square of plywood over the glass panel.
There was a car parked at the kerb in front. A grey Ford sedan, plain, very clean, with state government plates and a whip antenna on the boot. Thorsen parked behind it and climbed the steps.
The plywood door was open. Inside it, a staircase went up steeply to a landing, and at the top of the stairs a man was standing in a doorway, looking down at him.
He was sixty or more, and built like a fire hydrant, with a big square head, grey hair cut very short and small blue eyes that gave away nothing at all. He wore a brown corduroy sports coat, a badge on his belt, and rubber overshoes, though it was not raining. He was holding a paper cup of coffee.
“You’re the fellow from the television,” he said.
“Yes.”
“I don’t have a television.” He drank some coffee. “Wally Heikkinen. BCA. The Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. That’s the state police, more or less, for people from California.” His voice was flat and level and had the rise and fall of the Iron Range in it, a Finnish lilt that turned every statement into something that sounded faintly like a question and was not. “You’d be Thorsen.”
“I would.”
Heikkinen considered him. “Well, come up, then. You’re letting the heat out. Don’t touch anything. Not that there’s much left to touch.”
The apartment was four rooms under a sloping roof. It had been tossed, properly, by somebody who knew how. Every drawer was out, every book off the shelves, the couch cushions unzipped. In the small room at the front, which had been a study, the desk had been emptied onto the floor, and there was a clean rectangle in the dust on top of it where a laptop had stood, and a cable still plugged into the wall with nothing at the other end.
The window looked down over the roofs to the harbour and the lift bridge and the lake. Paul Strand had sat at this desk and looked at that.
“Landlady lives downstairs,” Heikkinen said. “Mrs. Sobczak. Eighty-three. She was at her daughter’s in Cloquet for the weekend, came home the Sunday night, the fourth, and found the door like that. Somebody at Duluth Police with more sense than most phoned the Baptism County Sheriff’s Office to tell them.” He drank coffee. “They said thank you. It’s not in their file. I’ve read their file. It’s eleven pages. Four of them are your cousin’s arrest record.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Because the county attorney asked me to.” Heikkinen took a pen out of his breast pocket and used it to turn over a sheet of paper on the floor without touching it. “Megan Ostrowski. Thirty-four. Appointed last year when old Pelletier had his stroke. She’s on the ballot in three weeks. She has to stand up in front of a judge and say she believes this case, and she read the eleven pages and she didn’t. The sheriff wouldn’t call us in, so she called us herself. That’s allowed. It’s not popular.” He looked up. “So here I am, very quietly, on my own. And here you are.”
“Here I am.”
“Why?”
“My uncle asked me to come and look.”
“And what do you see?”
Thorsen looked round the room.
“I see a man who kept everything on paper,” he said. “Box files, labelled by year. He’d have had a binder, on the desk, next to the laptop. And the floor’s full of paper, but none of it’s work. Whoever did this took the work, and turned everything else over so it looked like a burglary, and didn’t take the television or the camera,” he nodded at a good camera lying on the bed, “because they weren’t burglars, and they didn’t have time to pretend to be.”
“His car was at the Point,” Thorsen said. “Unlocked, Arne said. Was there a laptop in it?”
“No.”
“A bag? Papers?”
“No.”
“His phone?”
“Not on the body. Not in the car.” Heikkinen turned another sheet with the pen. “Sheriff Hollister thinks it’s in the lake. I’ve asked the carrier for his records. They tell me six weeks.”
“And the post-mortem?”
“Single blow, high on the back of the head. Something rounded, with an edge. The ME wrote consistent with a fall onto a rounded rock.” Heikkinen’s face did not move. “Hollister likes that sentence.”
“So he drives to the Point in the middle of the night, a man who was going to show his boss what he’d found, and nothing comes back with him.” Thorsen looked out at the lake. “Either he left it all here, and it was taken from here. Or he took it with him, and it was taken from his car, and then somebody came down here to make sure there wasn’t a copy.”
“Or both,” said Heikkinen.
“Or both.”
Heikkinen took a small spiral notebook out of his inside pocket and wrote something in it.
“Sheriff Hollister,” he said, “phoned my supervisor this morning to say that if I wanted to make myself useful I could keep an eye on a certain ex-LAPD fellow who’s come up here to interfere with a homicide prosecution.” He put the pen back in his breast pocket. “So I’m keeping an eye on you. Consider yourself watched.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. I’m Finnish. We don’t do anything for anybody.” He turned towards the door, and stopped, and said, without looking round: “His ex-wife teaches third grade at Cooper Elementary in Superior, across the bridge. Jenny Strand. She gets out at three-fifteen. You’d get more out of her than I did. She liked him.”
“Why are you telling me that?”
Heikkinen thought about it.
“Because I’ve got two years till I retire,” he said, “and a sauna I built myself on a lake outside Virginia, and I’d like to sit in it in peace without wondering whether we put the wrong man in prison for the rest of his life because a sheriff wanted a copper mine.” He went down two stairs, and stopped again. “I’m going to the impound in Nordby this afternoon to look at the car. Their inventory’s got a few things in it nobody’s asked about. You might want to stop by the lot about six. It’s a nice view of the lake from there.”
He went down the rest of the stairs, and Thorsen heard the Ford start and pull away.
Jenny Strand was a tall, thin woman of forty in a cardigan with pockets full of things that rattled, and she came out of the side door of Cooper Elementary at twenty past three behind a stream of small children, saying goodbye to each one by name. When the last one had gone she saw Thorsen by the fence.
“You’re him,” she said. “There’s a bench.”
She sat down.
“We were married nine years,” she said. “Divorced four. We still had lunch every month. We were better friends than we were married.”
“When did you last see him?”
“The Saturday before.” She looked at the empty playground. “The twenty-sixth. We had lunch at the Pickwick. He was so happy, Mr. Thorsen. He’d been to Kansas City. He’d been to some college down south. Northfield. He was all lit up. He said, Jen, for once in my life, I’ve found something that will actually matter to somebody. He said there was a family up the shore that had been robbed a hundred years ago and nobody had ever known. Not robbed. He used another word.” She stopped. Her mouth worked. “He said wronged.”
“Did he say which family?”
“No. He said he had to talk to somebody first. Somebody who’d know. An old man.” She turned and looked at Thorsen. “Was it your uncle? Is that who he went to see?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“They’re saying your cousin pushed him off a rock because they had a fight in a bar,” she said. “Paul didn’t fight. He’d have apologised to your cousin. He’d have bought him a beer.” She took a child’s green rubber dinosaur out of her pocket and turned it over in her fingers. “He went up there because somebody told him they’d tell him the truth. That’s the only thing that would have got Paul out in the car at night.”
He drove back up the shore in the last of the light.
Past Two Harbors the road climbs onto the cliffs, and for six or seven miles it runs along the top of them, a two-lane highway cut into red rock, with a steel guardrail on the right, and on the other side of the guardrail, nothing. Air, and then the lake, a hundred feet down, gone the colour of pewter in the dusk. Every half-mile or so somebody had hit the rail hard enough to bend it, and the county had bolted on a new section, bright among the rust.
There was nobody on the road. He had the radio off and Jenny Strand’s voice in his head. Somebody told him they’d tell him the truth.
The lights came up behind him on the long straight above the Gooseberry.
He saw them first as a glow in the mirror, far back, and then as two lights, and then, quickly, as four: headlights and a bar of driving lamps above them on the roof of a cab, all on full, so that the inside of the van filled with white light and his own shadow lay across the dashboard in front of him like a stain. He put his hand up to the mirror and flipped it. The light came in through the side mirrors instead, and through the back windows, and lit the slit foam mattress and the bins and the suit on its hanger as though somebody had opened the doors on a stage.
The lights did not pass. They came up to within a car’s length of his back bumper and stayed there.
He did not speed up. He did not slow down. He held the van at fifty-five on the white line with both hands on the wheel and watched the road in front of him, the curve coming, the guardrail swinging round on the right, and said to himself, quite calmly, in Ray’s voice: Don’t look at the lights. Look where you want to go.
On the curve the lights moved left. Into the other lane. The engine note behind him rose, a big diesel winding up, and the lights came up alongside, and for a moment there was nothing in his side window but the black flank of a pickup, high and long, close enough to touch, and no face in it, only a dark shape behind tinted glass.
Then it came across.
It did not ram him. It leaned on him. The steel of its front wing met the steel of the van’s front door with a long grinding bang that he felt in his teeth, and kept pressing, steadily, the way a man leans a shoulder on a door, and the van went sideways across its lane towards the guardrail with all four wheels still turning. He felt the right-hand wheels hit the rumble strip. He felt the steering go light. Through the windscreen the guardrail came at him out of the dusk, grey and bright and very close, and beyond it the dark.
He did the one thing the truck did not expect. He stood on the brake.
The van was old and heavy and Ray had changed its brake pads in August; Thorsen had seen the receipt in the glove box. It dug in. The nose went down and the seatbelt caught him across the chest like a bar, and the pickup, still leaning on air where the van had been, shot past him, and its back end swung, and for a long instant it was sideways in front of him with its tail out over the white line. Then the driver caught it, and it straightened, and the big diesel roared, and it went away up the road into the dark, fast, without lights now. All of them off at once. He saw it go: the shape of it against the last grey of the sky, the high cab, and on the front, black against the road, the square jaw of a plough mount.
Then it was round the next bend, and gone, and there was only the sound of it, going away, and then not even that.
The van had stopped on the shoulder, its right front corner perhaps a foot from the guardrail. He sat there with the hazard lights ticking and his hands on the wheel, and found that they would not come off it, and waited until they would.
He walked round the van with the torch from the glovebox. The driver’s door was pushed in along its whole length, a long shallow dent like a thumb pressed into clay, with a black smear across it at the height of a pickup’s wing. The wing mirror hung by its wires. The right front tyre had a gouge in the sidewall, but it was holding air.
He put his hand flat on the dent in Ray’s door, the way he had put it on the side of the Solveig in the fish house.
Below the guardrail the lake moved in the dark, a long way down. It made no sound at all from up here.
The Baptism County impound lot was a fenced square of gravel behind the county highway garage on the hill above Nordby, next to the salt dome. The little grey Subaru was in the far corner, alone, with an orange evidence sticker on the windscreen, parked facing the lake. From the fence you could see over the roofs of the town to the breakwater and the water going silver under the evening sky.
Heikkinen was leaning on the fence with his overshoes in the gravel, eating a doughnut out of a paper bag, looking at the view.
“Nice view,” he said, without turning round. Then he did turn round, because he had heard the van, and he looked at it for a long moment with the doughnut halfway to his mouth: at the long dent down the driver’s side, and the black smear, and the mirror hanging by its wires.
He put the doughnut back in the bag.
“Where?” he said.
Thorsen told him. Above the Gooseberry, on the cliffs. A big pickup with a light bar and a plough mount, no lights after, no plate he could see.
Heikkinen walked round the van once, slowly, and crouched at the driver’s door and looked at the smear without touching it. Then he fetched a camera and a scalpel from the grey Ford, photographed the door with a ruler against it, and scraped a few flakes of the black paint into an envelope and put it in his coat.
“You’re going to tell me you don’t want to report this to the Baptism County Sheriff’s Office,” he said, standing up with a grunt.
“I’m reporting it to you.”
He looked at the dent again. “There are a lot of black pickups with plough mounts on this shore. About one in three. In the morning you’d have been a man from California who didn’t know the road, in an old van, in the dark.” He looked at Thorsen. “Your hands are shaking.”
“I know.”
“Good,” Heikkinen said. “Means you’ve got sense.” He turned back to the fence and the view. “Come and look at the lake. And then come and read something.”
Thorsen came and stood beside him.
“The deputy who did the inventory was a young woman called Novak. I think she’s the only thorough person in that building. She wrote down everything. Then nobody read it.” Heikkinen took a folded sheet out of his coat and did not give it to Thorsen. He held it open on the top rail of the fence, as though he were reading it to himself, and Thorsen read it too.
Vehicle inventory. Subaru Impreza, grey, Minn. reg. A list. A scraper. A first-aid kit. A rain shell. A paperback with a library sticker, a history of the iron mines. Coins in the cup holder, one dollar forty. Three empty coffee cups, Kwik Trip. A pair of reading glasses, case. Floor mats.
And then, in the glove box:
Parking receipt, paper, St. Olaf College, Northfield MN, Visitor Lot C, dated 9/24.
Researcher identification card, laminated, National Archives at Kansas City, in name of STRAND, PAUL D., issued 9/18.
Call slip, paper, Minnesota Historical Society, Gale Family Library, St. Paul. Item requested: Baptism County, Register of Deeds, Deed Book 14 (microfilm). Dated 8/21.
Thorsen read it twice.
“Kansas City,” he said.
“That’s where the National Archives keep the old Indian Affairs records for this part of the country. Allotment files.” Heikkinen folded the sheet up again and put it back inside his coat. “A title examiner with doubts about an allotment deed goes to Kansas City. That makes sense.” He looked at the lake. “Northfield’s a college town south of the Cities. Two colleges. Cows. A bank Jesse James tried to rob. What’s a title man want in Northfield?”
“I don’t know.”
“No. Neither do I.” He crumpled the doughnut bag and put it in his pocket. “Here’s another thing I don’t understand. The sheriff’s file says Paul Strand’s car was found unlocked at the gate on the morning of the first, with the keys in the ignition. A man who parks his car and walks half a mile down a dark lane to the end of a point, in the middle of the night, in October, leaves his keys in the ignition and the door unlocked. That’s a man who’s expecting to come straight back. Or a man who isn’t thinking about his car at all.”
“Or the keys were put back.”
Heikkinen turned his head and looked at him.
“Somebody went through that car,” Thorsen said. “There’s nothing in it but coffee cups. Where’s his notebook? He had a notebook at the Legion. Twenty people saw it.”
Heikkinen was quiet.
“I’m going to say something,” he said, “and then I’m going to pretend I didn’t. You’re the family of the accused. Anything you touch, I can’t use. So don’t touch anything.” He pushed himself off the fence. “But if you happened to find out what a title examiner from Duluth was doing in Northfield on the twenty-fourth of September, I’d be interested to hear it. Over coffee. As a matter of local history.”
He walked back to the grey Ford. At the car he stopped and looked back across the roofs at the lake.
“Your uncle,” he said. “He knew Strand was coming back that night?”
“He says not.”
“Huh,” said Wally Heikkinen, and got in the car, and drove away.